Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

On her book The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and The Cultural Economy of Fashion

Cover Interview of August 23, 2011

A close-up

The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.

If I could direct readers to any part of the book, it would be to those sections in chapter 2 when I talk about how Asian American designers and Asian sewers talk to each other, using the language of kin—calling them uncles and aunties—and how they imagine their relationship to each other.

Those exchanges were very surprising to me because they seem to undo a lot about what we think we know about sewers and the craft of sewing—as low-wage, disempowered, immigrants doing unskilled work. They revealed to me that categories which seem so fixed to us are in practice actually constantly shifting.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011